For "River" read "Opportunity" or "Any Sense Of Proportion Or Humility" or maybe just "Mind".

Everyone knows that superstar success means that you are surrounded by people who don't say no to you. Perhaps the actor Ryan Gosling has been asking everyone if he should write and direct a movie influenced by David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn.

Having been answered enthusiastically in the affirmative - the same response might have met a plan to open a restaurant or market a brand of mango chutney - Gosling has made his helmer's debut. The result clunks. It is colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited. Yet it is frustrating precisely because it sometimes isn't so bad. There is something in there somewhere - striking images and moments, and the crazy energy of a folie de grandeur.

Lost River is a kind of ruin-porn gothic fantasy, set among the abandoned buildings of Detroit - although the title is in fact the name of a fictional town. (Perhaps it should be said that ruin porn here also means porn among the ruins: objectification of women in a decaying urban environment.)

Christina Hendricks plays a woman called Billy. Matt Smith plays a man called Bully. (I half expected Joanna Lumley to come on playing someone called Bolly.) Billy is an attractive single mom with a toddler and also a teenage son called Bones (Iain De Castecker) who roams around looting the wrecked houses for scrap metal, which brings him into conflict with Bully, a psycho tough guy who thinks he rules this desolate zone.

Billy is behind with the mortgage payments, so her sinister bank manager, Dave (nicely played by Ben Mendelsohn), offers her a job in a bizarre club he runs, with freaky cabaret acts based on torture and mutilation. Meanwhile, Bones falls in love with the girl next door, played by Saoirse Ronan, who is called Rat, because of her pet rat.

Benoit Debie's cinematography is impressive and so is Lon Bender's sound design. There are touches of early David Gordon Green – although Green always knew the value of restraint: Gosling gorges himself and us on images. The movie is choked with them – and choked on its own portentousness.

Gosling poses during the photocall for Lost River. Photograph: Julien Warnand/EPA

The movie's problem is that it tries to have its bizarre cake and eat it. Having placed us in a horrible and patently unreal nightmare world, Gosling also appears to want points for being concerned about real issues, such as communities being abandoned by the recession.

Its faults are huge: its virtues less so – but they are there. Gosling has energy and appetite. There is a delirious buzz to the drama. It is often ridiculous and fatuous but often ingenious. It could yet be that Gosling will mature as a director.

Continuing our series in which writers reveal the movie characters they want to emulate, Michael Hann explains why he took inspiration from Steve Carell's de-slobbing makeover (with a little help from Ryan Gosling) in Crazy, Stupid Love